Twitter to make some money

It’s valued at about a billion dollars, but makes struggles to make money – so what is Twitter going to do? Start charging for services, apparently.

Now don’t panic, Twitter addicts. This isn’t going to be a pay-per-tweet sort of thing. Founder Biz Stone stressed that the site “will always be free” for users, but said that they were looking into ways of making a bit of cash. One way, he told the Beeb, would be to explicitly offer commercial accounts – by paying, you could find out stats about your useage, get feedback, that sort of thing.

He also talked about selling off data to places like Google and Bing so they could use it more effectively (given that more than 50% of all twitter activity is done through external tools).

All very interesting. Probably a good thing that they try to make some money before some other fad comes along.

What is interesting, though, is that these comments came out at the same time that Stone was chatting away about Murdoch and his paywalls. He said he’d “love to see what happens” if Murdoch’s plans to block Google from accessing his websites go ahead. I’m sure we all would.

“They should be looking at this as an opportunity to try something radically different and find out a way to make a ton of money from being radically open rather than some money from being ridiculously closed.”

As, of course, they are. At least Twitter are being honest about what they’re doing. And they’ll probably grow in popularity because of it. What will happen to The Times and co? Who knows.